How To Stay A Step Ahead Of Your Hungriest PPC Competitors

There’s an old story of two hikers who come across a hungry-looking bear in their path. The first hiker starts running for his life. The second hiker stops, sits down on a rock, takes off his heavy hiking boots off, reaches into his backpack and pulls out a pair of running shoes.

The first hiker yells back at him, “What the heck are you doing? You know you can’t outrun a bear!” To which the second hiker matter-of-factly responds, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.”

To me, running PPC campaigns is a lot like being chased by a hungry bear twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Most of the time, I feel like I am running flat out just to keep even with competitors and to keep traffic and conversions flowing profitably from our campaigns.

Today, I’d like to take a few moments to pause, sit on a rock, and think like that second hiker.

What can we do to leave our competitors in the dust once and for all rather than have them nipping at our heels all the time? What does it take to create real, sustainable long-term advantage in competitive PPC markets?

Short Term Advantages Disappear Quickly

The first thing we all have to realize that nothing inside our campaigns today gives us any long-lasting advantage.

No matter how big our keyword lists, how clever our ads, how scientifically we set our bids and how attractively laid out our landing pages are, it doesn’t take long before competitors can see exactly what we are doing.

Keyword research used to be one of the secret high-arts of paid search magicians. You could sift through some keyword tool reports, create long keyword lists, write a few ads and then sit back to enjoy all the traffic from your campaigns. Not any more.

Now, keyword research is so easy, even kids can do it. As a matter of fact, as I look around at search conferences lately, it is clear that kids are doing it! Well, okay, maybe it’s just me getting older. (Note to self: time to update author bio photo.)

Google and Microsoft offer amazing keyword suggestion tools for everyone. And no matter how clever your keyword research, or how well you guard it, it does not take long for competitors to discover what words you are bidding on and how much you are spending by subscribing to tools like Adgooroo, SpyFu, Keyword Competitor, and SEMRush, to name just a few.

Think your great ad copy is a sustainable advantage? Think again. The minute your ads go live, your competitors can see them and react to them with ideas, counteroffers and calls-to-action copied right from your ads. Your advantage may last less than a day.

Think your new landing pages give you a sustainable advantage? Why?

Landing pages are also public and available for anyone to see – just one click away from the new ads you put online. Maybe it takes a few days or few weeks for aggressive competitors to redesign landing pages of their own, but that’s about it.

On a relative scale, here is how long these advantages will last:

Tactical Changes vs. Strategic Improvements

Don’t get me wrong. All of the campaign changes you make, day-in and day-out, adding keywords, writing ads, adjusting bids, and launching new landing pages, and are highly important. However, they are also very tactical and only impact short-term performance.

I have seen account managers in many companies, (myself included) make changes one day, forget what they did and why they did it, and reverse the changes a week later.

The problem is that making changes is really, really, easy to do and gives you such a power feeling of accomplishment. Spur of the moment inspirations are as likely to hurt performance as much as improve it.

Changing match type from phrase to broad to increase traffic, or changing match-type from broad to phrase match or exact because you CPA was too high yesterday.

Increasing search keyword bid to get more traffic without regard for ad position.

If you are spending most of your time and energy tweaking things this way, you will always have hungry bears breathing down your neck.

Your Only True Sustainable Advantage: Better Process

Okay, so I’ve made the point that any competitive advantage you enjoy today will go away as quickly as your competitors see what you’ve done. It may take a few days, weeks or months, but sooner or later, your competitors will try to match you step for step.

This is especially true if you are the recognized leader in your marketplace.What your competitors can not emulate are the thought processes that drive your decision-making. The better your decision-making process and the faster you can implement improvements, the harder it becomes for competitors to keep up with you.

So what constitutes better process?

Better process starts with a mindset that you want to get better every day, regardless of what your competitors are doing. Rather than looking over your shoulder to see what hungry competitors are on your tail, focus instead on your own company’s unique challenges and work hard to improve yourself. I guarantee you there is enough work there to keep you busy for years to come.

We all have plenty of data to work with; what separates winners from losers are the strategic insights they generate from their testing and reporting systems. There is no more powerful competitor than one who takes the time to understand their data, and by extension, their customers better.

None of us is born with the innate ability to design, implement and measure PPC test results. And even though we even know how important testing is in PPC advertising, few of us have formal training in statistics and experimental design.

Sure, we can rattle off expressions like A/B split testing, multivariate testing and the Taguchi method, but do we really understand what they mean? What does it mean to design a test, establish a good control and isolate variables.

We all have heard the expression “wait until you have statistically valid results” but would any of us recognize a valid result if it walked up to us and shook our hand? What is a confidence level, anyway? What is an F-test?

No matter what you know or don’t know now about testing, right now, start now to set aside time for learning. Dust off that old stats book and get ahold of books and blogs dealing with experimental design, testing and measurement.

In the short term, of course, you’ll have less time to mess around inside your PPC campaigns, but in the long run, you will develop a solid foundation for campaign optimization that will keep you miles ahead of your hungriest competitors.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Matt Van Wagner is President and founder of Find Me Faster a search engine marketing firm based in Nashua, NH. He is a member of SEMNE (Search Engine Marketing New England), and SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization as a member and contributing courseware developer for the SEMPO Institute. Matt writes occasionally on internet, search engines and technology topics for IMedia, The NH Business Review and other publications.